2010

A. A. Gill reports on his visit to Answers in Genesis's Creation "Museum" in the February 2010 issue of Vanity Fair — "a breathtakingly literal march through Genesis, without any hint of soul." "The Creation Museum isn't really a museum at all," Gill writes. "It's an argument. It's not even an argument. It's the ammunition for an argument. It is the Word made into bullets. An armory of righteous revisionism. ... This place doesn't just take on evolution — it squares off with geology, anthropology, paleontology, history, chemistry, astronomy, zoology, biology, and good taste. It directly and boldly contradicts most -onomies and all -ologies, including most theology."

The controversy over John Freshwater, a Mount Vernon, Ohio, middle school science teacher accused of inappropriate religious activity in the classroom, reached the pages of The New York Times (January 19, 2010), just as the lengthy administrative hearing on his termination is finally nearing its end.

Are you recovered from 2009's celebrations of the bicentennial of Darwin's birth and the sesquicentennial of the publication of On the Origin of Species? Good, because less than a month remains before Darwin Day 2010! Colleges and universities, schools, libraries, museums, churches, civic groups, and just plain folks across the country — and the world — are preparing to celebrate Darwin Day, on or around February 12, in honor of the life and work of Charles Darwin.

A bill in Mississippi is apparently the first antievolution bill of 2010. House Bill 586, introduced on January 12, 2010, and referred to the House Education Committee, would, if enacted, require local school boards to include a lesson on human evolution at the beginning of their high school biology classes. The catch: "The lesson provided to students ... shall have proportionately equal instruction from educational materials that present scientifically sound arguments by protagonists and antagonists of the theory of evolution."

The National Academy of Sciences has named Dr. Eugenie C. Scott the latest recipient of the NAS Public Welfare Medal. She joins an elite club that includes Carl Sagan, C. Everett Koop, David Packard, and Vannevar Bush.

Lawrence S. Lerner lauded the second edition of Eugenie C. Scott's Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction (Greenwood Press/University of California Press, 2009), writing, "Evolution vs. Creationism is a superb introductory guide through the tangle, whether the reader wishes simply to get a clear basic picture of what is going on and what one might expect in the future, or plans to dig further into the subject."